Just days after Amazon showcased its latest gadgets, a top executive who oversees the company’s devices division is stepping down. Rob Williams, a vice president who was also a member of CEO Andy Jassy’s elite “S-team” of advisors, has left his post and will officially retire from the company at the end of the year.
The departure of an S-team member is a rare event at Amazon, as the group is a highly respected inner circle with direct access to the CEO. Williams had been with Amazon for 12 years and was a key figure in the software and user experience of nearly all of the company’s products. He was even at the big devices event in New York this week, where Amazon unveiled new Echo speakers and color Kindle e-readers.
In an internal memo, Amazon’s head of devices, Panos Panay, said Williams had a “big impact” on the company’s products. Panay also announced a consolidation of several teams within the division, including the relocation of the Alexa team for cars into the broader Alexa group.
Williams’ departure comes at a challenging time for Amazon’s devices unit. The money-losing division has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs. It is currently in the midst of a multi-year effort to update its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI, a project that has been slow to roll out and lacks a clear path to generating revenue. Just this week, Williams was on LinkedIn promoting a new operating system called Vega, which is designed to replace Google’s Android on Amazon’s Fire TV devices.
